FEATURED CHEF

What began as an act of defiant inquiry into the sheer and opaque mythologies of the triangular slave trade, visionary Chef Christina positions her food practices at the sites where interpretation, invention, and reclamation meet. Retrieving recipes that weren’t given the air and resource to proliferate, Chef Christina is in a constant state of remembering and adorning memories of watching their grandmothers, aunties, and mothers make meals of deep nourishment appear out of the same thin air the direct testimony of their forebears disappeared into.

Chef Christina nods, winks, and bows to the cuisines of the West Indies, to be nourished and to remember what is beautiful and brutal about the diasporic cookery borne out of the transatlantic slave trade. The cuisines that came along these shores in the minds and bodies of those arriving here without choice.​

The vitality of food pathways traced to and throughout the West Indies and West Africa is reborn in the intertwining of new and hallowed cultural traditions and innovative flavor building that intentions liberation in edible inspiration, elegantly executed. With five years and counting as a chef and service provider in the Bay Area, Chef is finding the palatable nexus where cultural heritage and locavore priority intersect. She is constantly inspired by the abundance of the agricultural accessibility of living and working in and around Oakland, made apparent by the unique epicurean offerings of her seasonally focused menus.

Take or bring a seat at her table. She’s waiting to nourish you and share a tale or two.